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Suborbital space tourism finally arrives | FCC prepares to run public C-band auction | The big four in the U.S. launch industry — United Launch Alliance, SpaceX, Blue Origin and Northrop Grumman — hope to be one of two providers that will receive five-year contracts later this year to launch national security payloads starting in 2022. | China’s launch rate stays high | The International Space Station is the largest ever crewed object in space.

 
Study illuminates trade-off between complex words and...
Bruce Willis’s recent announcement that he was retiring from acting brought widespread public attention to the neurological condition aphasia. While everyone struggles occasionally with finding the right word or tripping over their sentences, aphasia patients can lose the ability to comprehend language entirely. Though Willis hasn’t confirmed it, some doctors suspect that he may have a particularly brutal and degenerative form called primary progressive aphasia (PPA). Scientists have long understood that there are several subtypes of PPA — some...

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Researchers release open-source photorealistic simulator for autonomous...
Hyper-realistic virtual worlds have been heralded as the best driving schools for autonomous vehicles (AVs), since they’ve proven fruitful test beds for safely trying out dangerous driving scenarios. Tesla, Waymo, and other self-driving companies all rely heavily on data to enable expensive and proprietary photorealistic simulators, since testing and gathering nuanced I-almost-crashed data usually isn’t the most easy or desirable to recreate.  To that end, scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) created “VISTA 2.0,” a...

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MIT engineers devise a recipe for improving...
Autonomous robots have come a long way since the fastidious Roomba. In recent years, artificially intelligent systems have been deployed in self-driving cars, last-mile food delivery, restaurant service, patient screening, hospital cleaning, meal prep, building security, and warehouse packing. Each of these robotic systems is a product of an ad hoc design process specific to that particular system. In designing an autonomous robot, engineers must run countless trial-and-error simulations, often informed by intuition. These simulations are tailored to a...

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Robotic lightning bugs take flight
Fireflies that light up dusky backyards on warm summer evenings use their luminescence for communication — to attract a mate, ward off predators, or lure prey. These glimmering bugs also sparked the inspiration of scientists at MIT. Taking a cue from nature, they built electroluminescent soft artificial muscles for flying, insect-scale robots. The tiny artificial muscles that control the robots’ wings emit colored light during flight. This electroluminescence could enable the robots to communicate with each other. If sent...

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New model helps identify mutations that drive...
Cancer cells can have thousands of mutations in their DNA. However, only a handful of those actually drive the progression of cancer; the rest are just along for the ride. Distinguishing these harmful driver mutations from the neutral passengers could help researchers identify better drug targets. To boost those efforts, an MIT-led team has built a new computer model that can rapidly scan the entire genome of cancer cells and identify mutations that occur more frequently than expected, suggesting...

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Robert Langer wins BBVA Foundation Frontiers of...
Robert Langer, the David H. Koch (1962) Institute Professor at MIT, received yesterday the 2022 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biology and Biomedicine in recognition of his contributions to messenger (mRNA) therapeutics and delivery technology, which enabled the rapid development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. Langer shares the award with Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, both of the University of Pennsylvania. Karikó and Weissman discovered how to modify mRNA molecules so that they could be used as a therapeutic agent,...

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Artificial neural networks model face processing in...
Many of us easily recognize emotions expressed in others’ faces. A smile may mean happiness, while a frown may indicate anger. Autistic people often have a more difficult time with this task. It’s unclear why. But new research, published June 15 in The Journal of Neuroscience, sheds light on the inner workings of the brain to suggest an answer. And it does so using a tool that opens new pathways to modeling the computation in our heads: artificial intelligence....

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Companies use MIT research to identify and...
In February 2020, MIT professor David Simchi-Levi predicted the future. In an article in Harvard Business Review, he and his colleague warned that the new coronavirus outbreak would throttle supply chains and shutter tens of thousands of businesses across North America and Europe by mid-March. For Simchi-Levi, who had developed new models of supply chain resiliency and advised major companies on how to best shield themselves from supply chain woes, the signs of disruption were plain to see. Two...

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Astronomers discover a multiplanet system nearby
Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered a new multiplanet system within our galactic neighborhood that lies just 10 parsecs, or about 33 light-years, from Earth, making it one of the closest known multiplanet systems to our own. At the heart of the system lies a small and cool M-dwarf star, named HD 260655, and astronomers have found that it hosts at least two terrestrial, Earth-sized planets. The rocky worlds are likely not habitable, as their orbits are relatively tight,...

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Center for International Studies honors Robert Wilhelm
The Center for International Studies (CIS) has long been valued as one of the world’s premier, university-based global research and education centers. A hallmark of the center’s many programs is the opportunity for academics and practitioners to work together on policy-relevant problems. The Robert E. Wilhelm Fellows Program is among the center’s most prestigious fellowships and is reserved for individuals who have held senior positions in public life. It has brought to campus heads of international non-governmental organizations, national...

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Stronger security for smart devices
Researchers are pushing to outpace hackers and develop stronger protections that keep data safe from malicious agents who would steal information by eavesdropping on smart devices. Much of the work done to prevent these “side-channel attacks” has focused on the vulnerability of digital processors. For instance, hackers can measure the electric current drawn by a smartwatch’s processor and use it to reconstruct secret data being processed, such as a password. Recently, MIT researchers published a paper in the IEEE...

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MIT announces 2022 Bose grants for ambitious...
MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart has announced three Professor Amar G. Bose Research Grants to support bold research projects across diverse areas of study including biology, engineering, and the humanities.  The three grants honor the visionary and bold thinking in the winning proposals of the following nine researchers: John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Sangeeta Bhatia; Carl Richard Soderberg Professor of Power Engineering Gang Chen; professor of biology Jianzhu...

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Nanoparticle sensor can distinguish between viral and...
Many different types of bacteria and viruses can cause pneumonia, but there is no easy way to determine which microbe is causing a particular patient’s illness. This uncertainty makes it harder for doctors to choose effective treatments because the antibiotics commonly used to treat bacterial pneumonia won’t help patients with viral pneumonia. In addition, limiting the use of antibiotics is an important step toward curbing antibiotic resistance. MIT researchers have now designed a sensor that can distinguish between viral...

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Engineers build LEGO-like artificial intelligence chip
Imagine a more sustainable future, where cellphones, smartwatches, and other wearable devices don’t have to be shelved or discarded for a newer model. Instead, they could be upgraded with the latest sensors and processors that would snap onto a device’s internal chip — like LEGO bricks incorporated into an existing build. Such reconfigurable chipware could keep devices up to date while reducing our electronic waste.  Now MIT engineers have taken a step toward that modular vision with a LEGO-like...

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Could used beer yeast be the solution...
A new analysis by researchers at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) has found that inactive yeast could be effective as an inexpensive, abundant, and simple material for removing lead contamination from drinking water supplies. The study shows that this approach can be efficient and economic, even down to part-per-billion levels of contamination. Serious damage to human health is known to occur even at these low levels. The method is so efficient that the team has calculated that...

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